(Greekmythology) A youth who spurned the love of Echo and fell in love with his own reflection in a pool: in some versions of the myth, he drowned trying to reach it, while in others he sat fixated until a god took pity and transformed him into a flower.

At the beginning of his narrative, Ishmael mentions Narcissus, the legendary character who plunged into the water and was drowned in the attempt to grasp his own essence (p. 14). Narcissus was unwilling to understand the relationship between himself and “the ungraspable phantom of life” in gradualistic terms and sought to bring that relationship to immediate closure, thus annihilating himself.

We may now affirm that Plato's cave is inhabited by Narcissus. He already knows, but the knowledge he possesses is still a bit confused, obscure (this knowledge is situated in the caves of the memory, a dark space much like Narcissus’s place).